Not Beyond Emotion
When we become a spiritual grown-up, we go beyond whining, but not beyond emotion.
Being a grown-up doesn’t mean you never have a bad day. Maturity simply means you can handle a bad day better. You’ve learned to make good decisions and to show compassion to yourself. You can try to see what’s going on by inquiring into the experience or by watching it from a little bit of distance. Sometimes you can step out of your blue mood, at least momentarily, while other times the best you can do is go through it as gracefully as you can without adding a lot of judgment or shame. Images of perfection don’t help us live the everyday challenges of human life. It is messy to be a human being, and that’s not something we need to leap over.
My image of a mature person is one who is transparent to feelings. He or she is not afraid of feelings and also not slave to them. Maturity is holding feelings in right perspective, as no more and no less than they truly are. With maturity, you have fewer of the habitual and reactive feelings (and let them pass more quickly), but you don’t bypass feelings altogether. You still feel compassion, joy, grief, sorrow, and so on. I think it is a mistake to look at the “master” who is totally removed from pain and feels compassion for the maggots eating his leg and take this as a model for our everyday lives.
While a rare few appear to be free from injuries to the personal self, prematurely trying to be there is a much more common problem and supports a dissociative response to life. Even those who have spent decades pursuing spiritual life are not above personal reactions to things. Take for example the stories of monks screaming at each other over trivial matters. They can meditate all day long, yet only become more sensitive to the elements of the personality that they haven’t learned to deal with.
Many of us who are drawn to spiritual life have found it difficult to be in the world. We’ve had to struggle a lot and been stung. We look to spirituality to help us deal with this, sometimes by grappling, other times by avoiding.
It’s certainly tempting to want to find an alternative to painful feelings, and spirituality is a big contender. If we concentrate long enough or learn to float in blissful states, we can, for that time at least, sidestep more difficult emotions. When this is supported by a philosophy that champions detachment, it is easy to create an atmosphere that is not welcoming of feelings. Several people have noted the underlying hostility that is rampant in many spiritual communities. This happens when there is no sanctioned place for anger or resentment, no tools for actually working with them. The attempt to rise above “negative” feelings actually hardens that which is being pushed further under the surface.
If what you’re after is hanging out in bliss states, it may work to sidestep feelings, but if what you want is a full life, embodying and living your spirituality, then you need to learn to work skillfully with emotions. If you don’t, your feelings may come out in ugly ways that hurt the people you love.
For me, the goal is not to transcend ego as quickly as possible, but to let it grow up so that it becomes healthier and more flexible. It can be more useful then—even letting itself be eclipsed at times, allowing us a transpersonal perspective.
Since much of ego is expressed through the emotional body, I think it is useful to do work that helps us open up or soften that body. We go to the places where our development was cut off so that it can continue its journey of maturation. Just as a child has to go through the stage of crawling in order to walk, we have to go through “childish” feelings in order to eventually grow beyond them.
This is a little hard on us when we are way beyond our childhood years. Who wants to feel two at the age of fifty? When you are centered in presence or a deeper identity, you can allow yourself to feel two years old because you know that these are just feelings and not all of you. If, on the other hand, you don’t have this larger perspective, you may resist those young feelings because you are actually identified with them and so it feels like exposing yourself.
Yes, it will be nice to move beyond sensitivity to rejection, beyond inadequacy, and so on, but we don’t get there by trying to race ahead. We get there when we can embrace these feelings in a loving and compassionate manner. Beyond is not so important then. It can happen in its own time.
I am not saying that we should always give precedence to our feelings. As I wrote in Under the Influence some feelings are habitual and keep us tied to the past. They reinforce our old identity and are part of our storyline. To keep running these feelings is counterproductive. Other feelings take us closer to the truth of who we are beneath the old identity. We thus need to be able to discriminate where our feelings are coming from and what function they serve.
As awareness develops, we go beyond the immediate data of our experience to become aware of the larger pattern that the experience is part of. So, for example, we become aware not only of hurt, but that the hurt comes because we feel misunderstood or not seen, and that this is an old hurt. We may even become aware that seeing and holding ourselves with compassion opens up this hurt so that we feel more intimate with ourselves. We feel our preciousness.
When we can experience a feeling without an automatic need to defend against it or act it out, it can dissolve more easily. Unconscious feelings, in contrast, stay intact.
I think it is useful to both be able to go through emotions and to be able to go around them. What we don’t want to do is go against them or pretend they’re not there. The goal is not the impassive face of Dr. Spock but the very human face of one who has lived a full life. Spiritual life is not beyond emotion.
[shortened from original version]
